## Metadata - Author: [[Donna Tartt]] - Full Title: The Goldfinch - Category: #books ## Highlights - In the shadowy room, a single blade of sun pierced between the curtains and struck across the room, where it caught and blazed up in a tray of cut glass decanters, casting prisms that flickered and shifted this way and that and wavered high on the walls like paramecia under a microscope. ([Location 2148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BAXFECK&location=2148)) - Downstairs—weak light, wood shavings on the floor—there was something of the feel of a stable, great beasts standing patiently in the dim. Hobie made me see the creaturely quality of good furniture, in how he talked of pieces as “he” and “she,” in the muscular, almost animal quality that distinguished great pieces from their stiff, boxy, more mannered peers and in the affectionate way he ran his hand along the dark, glowing flanks of his sideboards and lowboys, like pets. He was a good teacher and very soon, by walking me through the process of examination and comparison, he’d taught me how to identify a reproduction: by wear that was too even (antiques were always worn asymmetrically); by edges that were machine-cut instead of hand-planed (a sensitive fingertip could feel a machine edge, even in poor light); but more than that by a flat, dead quality of wood, lacking a certain glow: the magic that came from centuries of being touched and used and passed through human hands. To contemplate the lives of these dignified old highboys and secretaries—lives longer and gentler than human life—sank me into calm like a stone in deep water, so that when it was time to go I walked out stunned and blinking into the blare of Sixth Avenue, hardly knowing where I was. ([Location 2901](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BAXFECK&location=2901)) - in the night when I woke up jarred and panicked, the explosion plunging through me all over again, sometimes I could lull myself back to sleep by thinking of his house, where without even realizing it you slipped away sometimes into 1850, a world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards, copper pots and baskets of turnips and onions in the kitchen, candle flames leaning all to the left in the draft of an opened door and tall parlor windows billowing and swagged like ball gowns, cool quiet rooms where old things slept. ([Location 2936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BAXFECK&location=2936)) - How could the apartment have seemed so permanent and solid-looking when it was only a stage set, waiting to be struck and carried away by movers in uniform? ([Location 3326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BAXFECK&location=3326)) - The champagne tickled the roof of my mouth—distant, dusty sparkle, bottled in a happier year when my mother was still alive. ([Location 3453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BAXFECK&location=3453)) - THE PILL WASN’T STRONG enough to knock me out, but it kept me high and happy and somersaulting in and out of air-conditioned dreams. ([Location 3733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BAXFECK&location=3733)) - In New York, everything reminded me of my mother—every taxi, every street corner, every cloud that passed over the sun—but out in this hot mineral emptiness, it was as if she had never existed; I could not even imagine her spirit looking down on me. All trace of her seemed burned away in the thin desert air. ([Location 3775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BAXFECK&location=3775)) - How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me? ([Location 4421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BAXFECK&location=4421)) - We’d reached the juncture of the hallway where I had to turn for algebra and Boris had to turn for American Government: the bane of his existence. It was a required course—easy even by the desultory standards of our school—but trying to get Boris to understand about the Bill of Rights, and the enumerated versus implied powers of the U.S. Congress, reminded me of the time I’d tried to explain to Mrs. Barbour what an Internet server was. ([Location 4461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00BAXFECK&location=4461))